Last week I’ve been to my first ever pen show. That took a while… I’ve been using fountain pens for more than 35 years and have been blogging about pens for seven years, but no pen show until now.
Kirit Dal, who I’ve mentioned more than once in this blog, told me about the Northern Pen Show in Lytham St. Annes, organised by UK Pen Shows – just 40 minutes drive from my home. Luckily things worked out so that it was possible to go there.
We had glorious weather, which gave the whole day a great atmosphere to start with and once we, i.e. the whole family, arrived at the pen show it got even better, as everyone was super friendly.
On the Pen Addict podcast I heard Brad and Myke take about the size of pen shows by mentioning the number of tables, with small ones having around 20 tables and big ones 250 tables. Well, this one was one of the smaller pen shows with about 30 tables.
The focus of this pen show seems to have been vintage fountain pens, and from what I’ve heard and read this seems to be the norm. There were however also new pens and other stationery items, like ink, notebooks etc, available.
I thought I bring some fountain pens along, just in case there is some nib grinding going on. The most expensive pen I own for example has an F nib, but writes wider than most M nibs, but unfortunately there were no nib meisters around.
After I got a plan of the pen show I was trying to find Kirit Dal, who told me about this show in the first place. He wasn’t listed, so I thought he’s not there ..but later I noticed a suspiciously large amount of Robert Oster inks on one of the tables – and it turned out that the Oster inks belonged to the man I had been looking for!
I also met John Hall again. I first met him in 2014 when I found his shop Write Here while spending a weekend in Shropshire.
A while ago Scribble sent me some William Hannah paper. I certainly remember the paper – discovering the printer steganography on the paper came as a surprise to me. Well, I also came across David Round, the founder of William Hannah. He told me where the name of his company is from (his children’s name) and explained where all the different parts of his notebook are made. I thought it’s impolite if I start writing things down, but now I don’t remember 100% which part came from where, so I better don’t mention these details at all. Unfortunately the photo of him is not so clear – well my digital camera is nearly ten years old and I should have taken more than one photo, but unless you click on the image to see the large version it might look acceptable.
The weather was so nice, after visiting the pen show we went to St. Annes’ pier, which was just outside. You can see the hotel from there (just on the right).
We had a great day out!